Pax Medicus
by Jimmy Collins
Summary: The Time War rages on, as six soldiers struggle to survive.  What will come of the Doctor's Peace?  K plus, but only barely, because there's a bit of a nasty injury scene.  One shot, OC


"I hate it when that happens!" cried Averichollie. "Damn temporal resurrection."

In the corner, someone threw up.

"All right, everyone calm down! Calm down!" The Captain, currently a thin woman with short, sweat soaked hair and a slightly Asian complexion, commanded.

Not that anyone here was likely to know what an Asian was.

"Listen," the Captain continued. "We've got to remember what happened. We're still in the temporal grace period, but it won't last long. This time through, I want to win."

"Power's out," Mellyndycee offered. She wiped her mouth – it was she who had thrown up.

"Get it working," the Captain ordered. "Lieutenant: what's our damage status?"

The Lieutenant, brown haired and streaked with sweat and blood, pulled himself up to the console, clutching his stomach. "Main power couplings failed, fluid links burst, shields down…" he managed before collapsing to the ground. He exploded in a burst of white-hot energy.

The Captain walked over to the centre console and worked some of the TARDIS controls. "Sectors two, eight, and sixteen destroyed, sectors nine through fourteen damaged beyond repair – ejecting wreckage now – sectors three through five and sector fifteen badly damaged, but repairable," she finished, looking sadly down at the Lieutenant. It had to be rough, coming out of a temporal checkpoint that way – badly wounded and about to die. She empathised – they all did. They'd each had their own fair share of the temporal checkpoints.

Korberrylani, silently sitting against the rail, dark eyes glaring at the room, whispered "It was an ambush."

"Prepare for reinser- - - what?"

The Captain turned to Korberrylani. "What did you say?"

Korb stood up. "Ambush. Three Dalek warships hidden in the sensor disturbance."

Mellyndycee stood up. "Yes, I remember now. Captain, they had a lock on our position. And – oh!"

The Captain nodded. And then, they'd died. That was always the strongest memory – she'd been ejected out and torn apart in the vacuum of space, burning white hot as her body tried to keep itself together.

"Temporal reinsertion in ten" said a crewmember.

The Captain pressed a hand to her head. As soon as they entered into the normal timestream – not that there was any such thing as normal timestream here – they would be torn apart. There had to be a way out of this.

"Nine"

The Captain thought furiously. The Daleks would know they'd be expecting to be killed, so they'd likely have a secondary lock ready for wherever they tried to materialise to next.

"Eight."

"Stop that blasted counting, Dee, I'm thinking." What we needed, the Captain decided, was a decoy. Or, something to draw the weapons lock. They couldn't use the wreckage of the ship, that had already been ejected. She wished she hadn't done that – oh well, next time, if they died again. And if the Daleks didn't lock the temporal flow…

"Seven"

The Captain hit herself on the forehead. "I've got it! You, set the coordinates to 35, 86, 229. Then, on a command conditional – set the condition to our materialisation – have us reset to coordinates 667, 94, 27 – that's relative, of course, like always. Use emergency demat on both of them. And I want all that extra space we got in here now that we've ejected all that wreckage reversed and integrated into the matter beams. Go!"

"Six"

Deettyaniett counted softly as the others hurried to their stations. The Lieutenant popped up from the ground, now strangely albino in appearance and sporting a wicked and slightly unhinged grin. There was a glint of cold hatred in his violet eyes, though. "That's brilliant, Captain! Let's give them hell." He set his teeth.

"Five"

Averichollie set the coordinates, his fingers flying. The Lieutenant worked the ship's interior geometry. The Captain could hear her TARDIS shrinking, could feel its interior corridors readjusting to its new dimensions.

"Four"

From the feel of it, the Lieutenant had taken nearly all the excess space. Even the main control room shrank slightly, walls groaning in protest. Averichollie took his hands from the controls. "Done," he said.

"Three"

"Look, we don't need to use that much space. It's overkill. We're going to want to have _some_ prisoners for the Genesis Ark," the Captain said.

"Nearly done." The main control room continued shrinking.

"Two"

"Lieutenant, I order you to start on the matter beams!"

"Give me a moment!"

"One"

The Captain shoved the Lieutenant aside, and worked the controls herself. There wasn't time to double check, wasn't time to see if she'd done everything right…

There was a wave of timesickness as they re-entered the normal timestream. Although, 'normal' was probably a bad word for it. Time had been so stretched, torn, moved, restitched, and retorn and it had a permanent queasy feel. Each of the young Time Lords grimaced as they phased back into reality.

The TARDIS shuddered, and then bits of the console exploded as it completed its dangerous manoeuvres. The Captain was thrown to the ground. When she sprang up again, she could see white hot Dalek fire heading toward them on the view screen. She sprang up to the console and hit the button. "Fire!" she called raggedly.

It was sort of a clever concept, for something thought up on the go like that. Take the extra space stored in the TARDIS, space they didn't need, as most of it was the void, or strange, radiation choked death corridors, and reverse it until it becomes non-space, a sort of snarl in the fabric of space-time. Pack these into the weapons, and hopefully, if the Captain had done the math correctly…

All three enemy ships faded into nothing as the space-time around them folded itself into nonexistence. The space they inhabited no longer existed, those inside to be relegated to an eternity of nonexistence, feeling nothing, only the pain of their deaths forever…

She could almost hear the screams. Daleks have a strange way of screaming, all distorted as it came out of their suits. There's never any emotion, just raw pain. The Captain heard them, and _liked_ it.

Then, the missile hit.

The Ship rocked once more, and the Captain was once more thrown to the ground as various equipment exploded in an attempt to compensate. Their capacitors blew, it sounded like, and the shields looked to be beyond repair.

She pulled herself painfully into a crawling/sitting position and looked around. Various parts of her ship were on fire – that was bad – and alarm beacons were blinking on every section of the console – which was also bad.

Nearby, she could see Mellyndycee on the ground. It looked as if she'd impaled herself on one of the broken rails when the enemy fire had hit.

The Captain pulled herself over to Mellyndycee and cradled the girl's head on her lap.

"Shhh, shhh, Mel, we'll get you through this," she whispered soothingly. "Just give me a moment, stay with me here," she said, and grasped the pole tightly with both hands. "This'll hurt, but then everything will be okay," she said. Mel squeezed her eyes shut. Her hair and face were soaked in sweat, and she was shaking.

The Captain yanked the pole out. Mel cried out once, gritted her teeth, and began to breathe raggedly. It sounded as if she'd punctured a lung. "Captain," she hissed out of a mouth twisted in a rictus of pain.

The Captain smoothed the girl's hair. "Call me Shawendaylor," she said, decided the girl had deserved it.

"Sssssshhhharrr-went-dayyyeh-laaaah"

"Actually, maybe that's a bit of a mouthful," Shawendaylor admitted.

"Sssschaugh-sssschaugh-sssschaugh-sssschaugh"

It took the Captain a moment to realize that Mellyndycee was laughing. Blood spat out of her lips and landed on Shawendaylor's face. She did not wipe it off.

"Here," the Captain said, "Let's get you to the infirmary. You can hold on till then, right? Don't regenerate, we'll get you fixed."

It came again, the horrible laughter out of ragged lungs. "Can't," Mel said. "Section eleven's… gone."

"Oh. No." Shawendaylor breathed the last word rather than saying it. Everything was gone. No power reserves, no food, no life support…

On a whim, she asked, "How old are you?"

Mel swallowed, her throat moving slowly. "Twenty three."

Shawendaylor sighed. She would have been surprised, but there wasn't any room left for that now. It was all just the dull fight for survival – and when you lost, you were resurrected as a soldier if you got lucky, and sent into the fight again.

They were all too young – she herself was only in her three hundreds. But it was just unfair. Twenty three – that was nursery aged. That was still childhood. Mel shouldn't even be out of the Academy. But, that was just so typical of the Council. Too many young warriors were lost forever, the pale shadows of their souls brought back as Never-Weres, so they lowered the drafting age, so to speak. People like Mel were born into the war. They never knew the peace that came before it, never knew a Galifrey not half-ravaged.

"Why… not… reg-en-rrr"

Shawendaylor cut Mel off. It was a terrible sight to see her trying to form words, when each word gave her such pain. "You'll be born out of terror and war and death and fire. I don't want you to be like him," she jerked her head at the Lieutenant, who snarled at the view screen and made a rude gesture where the three Dalek ships had been minutes before.

"And… and I don't want you to be like me." What had happened, Shawendaylor wondered. We used to be the keepers of peace through the universe. Now, look at us. I sent those Daleks into a living hell of nonexistence. We were once great peacekeepers…

Yellow energy started to curl around Mel's skin, centred on the wound. With a nod, Shawendaylor slid the girl off of her knees and stood shakily up. She didn't watch as Mel changed.

"Captain, we're being hailed. It's… you won't believe this – it's the Doctor."

The Captain paused, a smile flooding her face. "The flagship?" She laughed, and, to her surprise, tears began to streak her face. She punched the air and bounced up and down. "We're going to make it! We're really going to make it! Listen up, crew: out there is the one man who can make anything happen." She whooped. "Tell him we need help, and badly. Send him a damage report, and let him know we've got wounded. Oh, and establish a checkpoint here. We don't want to have to go through all that nonsense with the Dalek ambush again."

Averichollie nodded and sent the message, then raised an eyebrow. "He wants to establish a direct link," Aver said.

The Captain nodded, unable to take the grin from her face. One didn't simply appear before someone as important as the Doctor like this. She needed dignity. Shawendaylor ran a finger through her hair and wiped away the worst of the sweat and grime. "Open the channel."

A holographic image of a large short-haired man in ragged clothing appeared. She could see, in the background, that his TARDIS was in pretty bad shape as well. But, it was clearly functioning better than theirs was.

"Doctor," she greeted him.

"Captain." His voice had a strange inflection to it, sort of a strange accent, though one the Captain had never heard before.

"New face?"

He smiled, though there was no mirth in it. Traces of golden energy were still floating off of his skin. "I could say the same about you."

"Doctor, we require a pick-up. I estimate that our time capsule will be unable to support life in a few hours."

There was a pause. Darkness seemed to pour into the Doctor's eyes – darkness and hatred. He looked rather disconcertingly like the Lieutenant.

"I'm sorry. Can't do that."

"What?" the Captain protested, but it was too late. The Doctor had cut the link.

The Captain stared at the place where the Doctor's face had been a moment before. Then, she turned to face her crew, her eyes hard and her jaw tense. "We'll get no help from him. Set a checkpoint. And I hope you like temporal resurrection."

Averichollie slammed the console with his hand. "Why?" he asked, but nobody answered him.

In the Doctor's TARDIS, he leaned heavily on the console and stared at a certain lever.

His vision swam at the corners, and the lever seemed to glow.

He shut his eyes. "I'm sorry, Captain," he said, and pulled the lever. And the world exploded.


End file.
